popular and interesting topic you see bandied about on warblogs and other sites discussion the issues with Muslims in the Arabic countries of the Middle East is whether or not their society is based on the "Honor/Shame" principle.  Read more to see what this means and if it's true.

December 17, 2002

Here's an email on this page that makes a point that I've heard made before, but it's worth restating. Here it is.

A brief comment on the Honor/Shame of being a Muslim these days. The types that dominate news networks with heir fiery invective, enshrouded women and angry suicides are followers of the Wahhabi and Shi'a sects, both considered heretical by the majority Sunnis. I can't comment at length on this, having little understanding myself on the various differences between us moderate Sunnis and the controversial types as the Ahmadiyahs and the Ismailis. But the people that you see on the news are no more representative of us than Jimmy Swaggart is of the United States. They are members of cults which started out small and acquired power from the British colonists over much of the Arab and Islamic world, their bloodthirsty exploits quite eclipsing the liberal attitudes of the Turks. Try imagining the Moonies or the Amish suddenly going berserk and taking over the whole of America, and you are close to what I mean.

I'm not sure quite what prompted this mail; it came in today and I don't think I've written anything about intolerance by Muslims for at least a week, since the Miss World/Nigerian riots. From the opening sentence I'd assume she (the emailer) saw the compiled article about the whole honor/shame concept in Islamic cultures, and wanted to share her thoughts.

There is a good point, in that it's very easy to refer to "Muslims" when talking about terrorists or tyrants like Saddam, and that's pretty inaccurate.  Like the example given, the nutty ones are a tiny minority. After all, you didn't hear condemnations of all Catholics world wide when the IRA was blowing up cars in London.

The obviously objection to her email is that Jimmy Swaggert and the Amish and the Moonies never ruled any nations, or took control of their entire religions and moved them in hate-filled and terrorist-sponsoring directions.  And yes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.

Also, if the minority of violent kooks are running things, everyone under their power is going to be blamed for their actions.  All Americans are blamed for Cowboy Bush's proposed military adventures, for example. And the moderate majority of people have a responsibility to overthrow/replace their leaders, if the leaders get out of control and start espousing crazy policies.  This goes for countries as well as religions.  If the people don't, then they don't have much to complain about if they're tarred with the same brush of condemnation.  It's harder in a religion, obviously a US Muslim has zero input or power over what Saddam,  or Iran's Mullah's, or  Osama Bin Laden does in a country on the other side of the world.  But the Muslims in those countries do.

August 12, 2002

I got to talking to a friend about the current Muslim problems, and about the whole "honor-shame" culture thing, and about three ICQs in it occurred to me that my comments would make a decent site blog thing.  So I pasted them to my notes page, and with slight rewriting, expanding, and link-insertion, here they are.

In the debate about how best to deal with the Islamic mindset that spawns terrorism and repression and religious intolerance in the Arab world, the concept of Islam being an "honor-shame" culture is often bandied about.  The comparison that's made is to Imperial Japan, which was also honor-shame, by the definition provided, until their defeat in World War II.

I think the whole honor-shame thing is pretty arguable, but just for the sake of the argument, we'll let it by.  How does the modern Islamic world, the Arab nations primarily, compare to Imperial Japan?  Not very well.

The Japanese were very insular and convinced of their superiority, not just desperately wanting to be superior while being eaten by a constant inferiority complex.  The Japanese had virtually no contact with the outside world, no TV, no internet, etc. So when they were defeated in spectacular fashion, and then there were foreign soldiers everywhere, their heads just exploded, and their entire culture changed, especially since their faith was placed in one leader, the Emperor, and he changed, (working with the Allies, especially MacArthur) giving them an example to emulate.

In the Muslim countries today, there is no central leader, just lots of individual kings and princes, most of which are hated by the common poor man.  There isn't any Pope of Islam, and most people get their direction from various mullahs in communities, and from their media.  They aren't like insular and isolated Imperial Japan; modern Muslims, even in the Arab nations, know about the rest of the world.  They see how people live elsewhere, and their hatred and fanaticism is fanned largely by jealousy and envy of our consumer goods and freedoms, though they won't admit that. So they cling to a medieval interpretation of their religion, which is encouraged by their leadership since it discourages democracy or freedom, making it easier to keep the angry masses in line.

As you often hear, the Saudi's and Egyptians keep the press full of "Hate Israel", and the Iranians and Iraqis and others keep it full of "Hate the US", since it keeps the people focused on external bogeymen, rather than noticing the horrible slum they are living in and their lack of rights or prosperity or intellectual freedom.

Their interpretation of Islam is a great tool also, since it's all full of male superiority.  The men get a boost thinking they are better than women, and as an extension of that they help to oppress their women.  This keeps the poor masses in line by filling half the population with delusions and oppression, and keeping the other half oppressed and ignorant.

Muslims have been smashed in wars several times, and I don't think they have any illusion of superiority at this point, other than maybe moral. Israel kicked numerous nation's asses a couple of times in recent memory, and no Muslim would seriously argue that the US couldn't wipe the entire Persian gulf area flat.  They are pretty damn pissed off about it already, and the argument from an honor-shame PoV is that they should be questioning their very existence based on this sort of humiliation.  I think pretty clearly that's not happening.

Based on that, I don't see anything that could be so shocking to the Arabian Muslims that they would change their behavior around.  Some of the more pro-war bloggers seem to think that some sort of magic will happen if only the Muslims can be made to see that they aren't really superior, as their honor-shame culture tells them they are.  What would do the trick?  US tanks rolling through Mecca?  Iraq flattened?  I don't think anything would do it, and I think it's a fairy tale to think that the people would abandon their religion and culture if only they can be convinced of of their inherent inferiority, which seems to be the goal of the whole "they are honor-shame" argument.  Tribes in Afghanistan were beaten down, dependent on the US invaders for their food and survival, and how many of them did you see renouncing Islam for democratic secularism?

There isn't any real cohesiveness in the Muslim world. Everyone has their own interpretation of the Koran, different degrees of repression of women and infidels, etc. People tend to cling to their own beliefs tenaciously, especially religious ones.  Is the US flattening Iraq going to make people in Iran see the error of their ways? Or will it make them see their brothers in culture and religion under attack and make them hate us more?

I'd say #2, personally.

The whole honor-shame thing is invented for the sake of convenience anyway.  Japan was like that, and after they were defeated in war they changed from a hostile monarchy to a democracy and joined the free nations of the earth.  So people who want a war with Iraq (or Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or whoever) try to draw the comparison since the historical precedent is so encouraging.

In Japan in 1945 there was incredible shock that they could be defeated, and that their god-king-emperor would bow down to the foreign conquerors.  This shocked the people into rethinking everything, and they were able to change their country with amazing speed with assistance from their basically-benevolent conquerors.  The had an educated and highly-skilled population, and their country was largely untouched by the ravages of war, aside from two rather obvious examples. It was easy to retool their war industries to produce consumer goods, and with some foreign aid they were able to become a world power in just a few years. The Arabic countries are very different; most have no economic base at all, other than oil, they are poorly-educated, half their population is uneducated or discriminated against, etc.

The thing that many of the war bloggers seem to overlook, or just conveniently ignore, is that Islam isn't really to blame.  Any religion can be used to justify oppression and torture and slavery of foreigners or women.  Christianity was used for that through most of Europe for about 1500 years, after all.  Fortunately for our world, there was a renaissance around 500 years ago, and after a few last gasps of mass murder (like the Spanish Inquisition) the ruling religious authorities steadily lost their power.

Today the Western world is largely free of religious rule, and people are free to worship as they choose most places, and with the downfall of theocracies we've seen peace and prosperity as never before in human history.  Aside from WW1 and WW2, that is.  *cough* But most of human history was a constant time of turmoil and war, where peace was the very rare exception.  It's the rule today, in most of the world, if only because the consequences of war are so much more severe that people won't risk it, at least if they aren't driven by a fanatically-illogical philosophy (such as religion).

There are millions of Muslims in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, etc, and they are as likely to be good citizens and love their country as Christians or Catholics or Atheists.  The reason is that they were raised, or at least live, in a culture of freedom and tolerance.  There has never been a worldwide Islamic renaissance, and this is a problem in the corrupt and totalitarian kingdoms of the "terrorist nations".  However I don't see their religion as the main problem; that's just the whip their rulers use to stir up the people and keep them passive and inline. There are plenty of violent tyrants around the world who aren't Muslims (see much of Africa, and most Communist nations 20 years ago) and you could probably have made the same honor-shame argument about them that people are making today about Islam.

Religions are inherently neutral things.  They can be used for great good or great evil, just like nationalism.  Anything illusionary/immaterial and inspiring that a leader can use to stir his followers up with is a powerful weapon.  It's what the people are stirred to do that deserves the discussion, not so much the tool that stirs them.

The Muslims in the Western world view their religion as a guideline, see the good things in it, and practice their religion in accordance with the culture they live in.  This isn't anything unusual, 99% of the Christians do the same thing, which is why Christian fundamentalists, people who actually believe in the literal word of God, or at least what they interpret it as from the Bible, are regarded by other people as kooks. Most Catholics use or support the use of birth control, think there should be female priests, lie in confession, etc.  Yet they still regard themselves as good Catholics, since they look at the bigger picture.  Not to pick on Catholics, but just as an example of how a person can be of a religion, without overly adhering to what the religious leaders decree.  A few hundred years ago common Catholics were burning witches at the stake since they thought it was what God wanted.  The bible hasn't changed, only the interpretation of it and the culture of the wider world.

The more immediate question, theology and philosophy aside, is what's going to happen with Iraq.  I don't have an answer, I don't have a strong PoV, but I do have a prediction.

I've seen lots of info that makes a "regime-change", as Bush et al keep calling it, seem like a very good idea, and perhaps even a necessity.  Better we take them out now, before they get The Bomb.  On the other hand, I've seen other info and opinion that was equally-convincing of what a horrible idea an invasion would be, and how it wouldn't do anything but push other Arab nations further into fanaticism and violence.  From what I've heard about the post-Saddam plans (which are optimistic) the US has no good long term solution.  It's rather a "remove him and hope for the best" strategy, which is less than encouraging.  Look at Afghanistan, it's already slipping back into anarchy and the control of Taliban-light warlords, due to the lack of popular support for the aged puppet ruler the US military installed, largely based on his enthusiastic support of the various US oil company exploration projects and pipelines.

The common people in Afghanistan aren't any less angry with the US than they were previously, and in fact they might be more angry, after the supposed-thousands of civilian casualties they have suffered, and continue to suffer as US planes bomb wedding celebrations.

Yes, this was a long way to come to announce that I don't have any real solution to propose.  So I'll look at some other arguments on the topic.

Saddam is a dangerous mad man, he murders anyone he suspects to be an enemy, he starves his own people while building new palaces and blaming US trade sanctions, he stages grotesque public parades of dead children, he writes checks to the families of suicide bombers.  Those are mostly character flaws, and internal politics.  The bigger threat is that he may obtain and use weapons of mass destruction, the worst being nuclear.  He's obviously inclined, he used chemical warfare on the Kurds and during the Iran/Iraq war, and it's not a big step up from that to firing a nuke at Israel.  You can frame the "Get Saddam?" question in terms of "Get Hitler in 1935?".  That's not all that accurate, but the principle is the same; take action now before it's too late to prevent something far far more serious.

On the other hand, there are a lot of "if's" and assumptions in that strategy.  There have been and will be numerous genocides around the world in the last and next decade.  We didn't take any action to stop it in Ethopia or Rwanda or Yugoslavia until after the fact, (if then) and there are several other nations in Africa now with intense ethnic hatreds and potential for massacres.  See any US troops massing on their borders, or presidential news conferences about it?

Admittedly, that's a nit-picky argument. It's like saying that if you aren't going to stop every egg from dropping, you shouldn't stop any of them.  Yes, obviously Iraq is important since it's about oil, but the potential for world wide problems from it are far greater than the other miserable little countries that could use outside interference to remove insane rulers.  I've seen lots of articles pointing out the rather weak justifications for a US attack on Iraq, and the short-sightedness of doing it, without considering the effect in other countries in the area.

What it boils down to is that no one denies that Saddam being gone wouldn't be a good thing, but many experts in Middle Eastern politics and military matters think it would be very difficult to pull it off, and might cause so many problems in other countries that we'd do more harm than good with the effort.

May 3, 2002

A lot of the "war-bloggers", who by definition are obsessed with the current US military actions here and there, have lately been expounding on the society and culture of the Arab nations.  The newish theory is that the Arab Muslim societies are honor-shame cultures, where it's most important how others see you, and how you are in comparison to them.

The main (and very convenient) comparison is to Imperial Japan, which was fanatically insular and hostile to outsiders, and only by being utterly defeated in WW2 and occupied by American troops were they shocked out of their Emperor-worship and into the modern world. A detailed argument about this can be seen right here, thanks to Sound and Fury for the link.

Islamic Arabia is an honor-shame culture. In such cultures, the primary concern is what others believe about you. If others believe you are inferior, then you are humiliated and shamed, and you will hate not only those who perceive you in such a shameful way, but also the source of that perception.

Read the whole thing if you are interested, the quote here is only a small portion of the argument.  It's an interesting concept, though enormously over-generalizing, in typical American/Western fashion.  Let's reduce the goals, thoughts, and desires of a billion people to a primitive, feudal, insecure mindset. Some cultures are changed from without through war, most are changed from within by individuals.

No one invaded the US and forced us to treat blacks and women as full humans, able to vote and own property and pursue liberty and justice.  The mindset and societal attitudes changed over time, lead by a few key individuals.  I see a strong parallel to the frequently-demonstrated way that new scientific theories come to be majority views; that the old guard dies off, and the younger scientists who were more open to new ideas come into their prime and embrace the new paradigms.  In other words, people don't change much, they just get old and die off, while younger people come up with the new ideas in their heads from the beginning.  Conceptual evolution is the same as physical change through evolution, in that individuals don't change, populations do, over time, as older models/mindsets die off or retire, clearing the way for major changes.

Mindsets are much more malleable than physical anatomy, and can change over time, but try to get your grandparents to like rap music, or approve of interracial marriage.  They are just hardwired to how things were in the 30's or 40's or 50's, and though they might want to overcome it, they're unable to really open their minds.  We'll be the same way in 30 or 40 years, wondering what the hell kids are wearing these days, and what their goddawful music is.  (Actually I've been wondering that since I was about 19, but don't mind me.)

As I was thinking about this whole "changing Islam" blog topic today, and preparing to write something up on it tonight, I happened to see this shot, from the most popular pictures on Yahoo.  It's from Iran, supposedly the biggest terrorist sponsor on earth, but also a country that's got a much more moderate and worldly younger class, who are pushing against the restrictions the older ruling class and priesthood imposes on them.

Young women walk through the Tajrish bazar in north Tehran, Iran in June 2001. Almost day by day, new boundaries are being defined for the "hijab," or Muslim dress code for women enforced since the Islamic revolution 23 years ago.

The women shown aren't exactly Britney Spears back up dancers, but they're wearing slacks and dresses, form-fitting clothing, faces and hair are uncovered, etc.  It could easily be a shot from a NY restaurant.  I'm not saying this means they won't have another revolution, or that the mullahs won't crack down violently on women not wearing veils and burkas and such.  The Islamic Revolution in Iran was mostly fueled by the younger people, from my understanding of it.  I'm just pointing out that it's overly-simplistic to portray 1/5 of the world's population as identical, honor-shame victims, that can only be shocked out of their primitive mindset by military action.  That seems to me to be a rather wild hypothesis, one that's attempting to be self-serving in providing motivation for military actions that may well escalate into WW3, or at least do nothing but make much of the world hate and fear Western culture even more than they do now.

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